The Jungle (1906) is a novel by American author and socialist Upton Sinclair. It describes the life of a family of
Lithuanian immigrants working in
Chicago's Union Stock Yards at
the beginning of the 20th century. The novel depicts in harsh tones the poverty, complete absence of social security, scandalous living and
working conditions, and generally utter hopelessness prevalent among the have-nots, which is contrasted with the deeply-rooted
corruption on the part of the haves. The sad state of turn-of-the-century labor is
placed front and center for the American public to see suggesting that something needed to be changed to get rid of American
"wage slavery".[1] The novel is also an important example of the "muckraking"
tradition begun by journalists such as Jacob Riis.
Sinclair wanted to show how the mainstream parties of American politics, already being tied into the industrial-capitalist
machine, offered little means for progressive change. As such the book is deeply supportive of values and criticisms held by
Communism, a movement still in its infancy at the time.
Upton Sinclair came to Chicago with the intent of writing this novel; he
had been given a stipend by the socialist newspaper The Appeal to Reason. Upon his arrival in the lobby of the Chicago
Transit House, a hotel near the stockyards, he was quoted as saying, "Hello! I'm Upton Sinclair, and I'm here to write the
Uncle Tom's Cabin of the Labor Movement!" (Arthur, 43). He rented living
quarters and immediately immersed himself in the city by walking its streets, talking to its people, and taking pictures. One
Sunday afternoon, he fell in with a group of Lithuanian immigrants traveling from a wedding to the party that was to follow; he
was welcomed to the festivities and spent the evening there dancing the night away - "Behold, there was the opening scene of my
story, a gift from the gods."
The novel was first published in serial form in 1906 by The Appeal to Reason; "after five rejections", its first
edition as a novel was published by Doubleday, Page & Company on February
28,1906, and it became an immediate bestseller.[1] It has been in print ever since.
Public and federal response
Chicago meat inspectors in early 1906
Sinclair's account of workers falling into meat processing tanks and being ground, along with animal parts, into "Durham's Pure
Leaf Lard", gripped public attention. The morbidity of the working conditions as well as the exploitation of children and women
alike that Sinclair exposed, showed the corruption taking place inside the meat packing factories. Foreign sales of American meat
fell by one-half. In order to calm public outrage and demonstrate the cleanliness of their meat, the major meat packers lobbied
the Federal government to pass legislation paying for additional inspection and certification of meat packaged in the United
States. [2] Their efforts, coupled with the public
outcry, led to the passage of the Meat Inspection Act and the Pure Food and Drug Act of 1906, which established the Food and Drug Administration.
Although the meat packers were lobbying the government for legislation, they were actually opposed to having federal
regulation of their products. Sinclair and President Theodore Roosevelt were both
integral in the passage of the Meat Inspection Act and the Pure Food and Drug Act of 1906. Roosevelt was sent multiple copies of
The Jungle, including one by Sinclair himself, prompting curiosity about the matter of meat inspection, but not much else.
After much persuasion from Sinclair as to the seriousness of the situation, Roosevelt agreed to send two men to investigate
Sinclair's claims. The men the president chose, Charles P. Neill and James B. Reynolds, had both done investigative work for
Roosevelt before, and were thought trustworthy. Sinclair really wanted Roosevelt to send his inspectors into the factories so
they could see how poorly the workers were being treated; he wanted the nation to become better educated on the aforementioned
issue of "wage slavery". Instead, what he got was tunnel vision reports from Neill and Reynolds. Instead of the poor conditions
and inhumane treatment of the workers, they chose to focus their reports on only the cleanliness, or lack thereof, in these
packing factories.
Even though the meat packers had forewarning and time to clean up, the conditions Neill and Reynolds observed were described
as "revolting;" the only claim left unsubstantiated by the report was the sensational claim that workers who had fallen into the
giant lard vats were left and sold as lard. Roosevelt was so concerned about the impact of Neill and Reynold's report on western
stock growers and European meat importers that he did not release the findings for publication. Instead, he helped the issue
along by dropping hints of what was in the report, alluding to disgusting conditions and inadequate inspection measures. This
pressure was adequate, although the bill that was finally passed did not include dating cans of meat or charging the packers for
inspection costs.[3] Sinclair actually rejected this
legislation, seeing it as an unjustified boon to large meat packers partially because the U.S. treasury had to bear the costs of
inspection at $3,000,000 a year.[4][5] He famously noted the limited effect of his
book (which led to meat packing regulations, but not to reform of the wages and living conditions of its workers) by stating, "I
aimed at the public's heart, and by accident I hit it in the stomach."
In 1914 the All Star Features Corp. produced the silent film 'The Jungle' based on Sinclair's book.
Plot summary
Panorama of the beef industry in 1900 by a Chicago based photographer
The novel opens with a dramatic description of a Lithuanian wedding feast, which introduces
the reader to all of its major characters — Jurgis Rudkus (originally "Rudkos"[6]), his bride Ona, their extended family and their friends. The musicians play, the guests dance, food
and drink flow freely, but an undercurrent of terror foreshadows what is to come — will they fall hopelessly into debt while
fulfilling their cherished tradition of an extravagantly generous Lithuanian wedding?
| “ |
Most fearful they are to contemplate, the expenses of this entertainment. They will
certainly be over two hundred dollars and maybe three hundred; and three hundred dollars is more than the year's income of many a
person in this room. There are able-bodied men here who work from early morning until late at night, in ice-cold cellars with a
quarter of an inch of water on the floor--men who for six or seven months in the year never see the sunlight from Sunday
afternoon till the next Sunday morning--and who cannot earn three hundred dollars in a year. There are little children here,
scarce in their teens, who can hardly see the top of the work benches — whose parents have lied to get them their places — and
who do not make the half of three hundred dollars a year, and perhaps not even the third of it. And then to spend such a sum, all
in a single day of your life, at a wedding feast! (For obviously it is the same thing, whether you spend it at once for your own
wedding, or in a long time, at the weddings of all your friends.) It is very imprudent, it is tragic — but, ah, it is so
beautiful! Bit by bit these poor people have given up everything else; but to this they cling with all the power of their souls —
they cannot give up the veselija! |
” |
| |
— Upton Sinclair, The Jungle, Chapter
1
|
Lured away from Lithuania by promises of a better life, the Rudkus family has arrived in
the Back of the Yards neighborhood of Chicago, Illinois at the end of the 19th century, only to
find that their dreams of a decent life are not likely to ever come true. Jurgis has brought his father Antanas, his fiancee Ona,
her stepmother Teta Elzbieta, Teta Elzbieta's brother Jonas and her six children, and Ona's cousin Marija Berczynskas along. From
the very beginning they have to make compromises and concessions in order to be able to survive. They fall prey to
con men, and unscrupulous realtors cheat them out of their plans to own a home. The
family had envisioned that Jurgis alone would be able to support them, but one by one, all of them — the women, the young
children, and Jurgis's sick father — are forced to find jobs and contribute to the meager family income. The black shadow of
capitalism takes ahold of their family as they are forced to succumb to the demands of the upper class. As the novel progresses,
the jobs and means the family uses to stay alive lead to their moral decay.
They are faced with a cruel world of work in the Chicago stockyards, where everyone has his
or her price, where everyone in a position of power, including government inspectors, the police and judges, must be paid off,
and where blacklisting is common. A series of unfortunate events — accidents at work, a number
of deaths in the family that under normal circumstances could have been preventable — lead the family further towards
catastrophe. Jurgis Rudkus, the book's main character, is young, strong, and honest, but
also naïve and illiterate; this erstwhile Lithuanian farmboy is no match for the powerful
forces of American industrial capitalism, and he gradually loses all hope of ever succeeding in the New World. After Ona dies in
childbirth — for lack of money to pay for a doctor — and their young son drowns in the muddy street, he flees the city in a state
of utter despair. At first the mere presence of fresh air is balm to his soul, but his brief sojourn as a hobo in rural America shows him that there is really no escape — even farmers turn their workers away when the
harvest is finished.
Men walking on cattle pens in the Chicago stockyard (1909)
Jurgis returns to Chicago, and holds down a succession of jobs outside the meat packing industry — digging tunnels, as a
political hack, and as a con man — but injuries on the jobs, his past, and his innate sense of personal integrity, continue to
haunt him, and he drifts without direction. One night, while looking for a warm and dry refuge, he wanders into a lecture being
given by a charismatic socialist orator, and finds a sense of community and purpose. Socialism
and strong labor unions are the answer to all the evils that he, his family, and all their
fellow sufferers have had to endure. Industry needs to value labor instead of just the product. A fellow socialist employs him,
and he resumes his support of his wife's family, although some of them are damaged beyond repair.
Soon after, the socialist rally is triumphantly chanting "Chicago will be ours!" and Jurgis has caught the eye of a
sympathetic young woman.
Jungle as metaphor
Upton Sinclair titles his book The Jungle to make a specific criticism of the capitalist system. The mechanization of
American society was supposed to bring progress and increased order. Sinclair, however, notes that this increased industrialism
has had the reverse effect. Sinclair's Packingtown more closely resembles a Darwinian jungle, or Thomas Hobbes' envisioned "state of nature" — individualistic,
ultra-competitive, and amoral. Every man must learn to fight for himself, and the strong constantly prey on the weak. Thus
Sinclair contradicts the belief that industrialization and capitalism bring increased order by equating such a reality to that of
the jungle. The Jungle is a major critique of laissez-faire capitalism and the greed and fierce competition that it brews.
Using a rain forest as a literary device was not new to literature at the time; its romantic connotations had been explored by
Rudyard Kipling in the Jungle Book
(1894). Mowgli, the hero of these works, is adopted by animals, and
thrives with their help. A somewhat darker version of the metaphor was employed by W.H.
Hudson in Green Mansions (1904), in which
Rima, a girl raised in the Amazon, is undone by the sophisticated machinations of her lover
and her adoptive father; and by Frank Baum in the first of the The Wonderful Wizard of Oz novels (1900), wherein the
protagonists are terrorized during their passage through a dark forest. Describing a city in this way, however, was a new
development.
The metaphor had been visited in an even darker way by Joseph Conrad in
Heart of Darkness in 1902, and was revived by the
novella's adaptation into the movie Apocalypse Now in 1979. The Asphalt Jungle, a 1950
film, recreated a sense of the cruelty of the 20th century urban condition. A resurgence of the romantic use of this metaphor is
demonstrated in Disney's The Lion King, created in the 1990s. The term
jungle has largely been replaced by rain forest, but the connotations of the word are
still well-known. By using the jungle as metaphor, Sinclair suggests that those who attempt to succeed through capitalist means
are not "the fittest" but instead are the most corrupt.
Footnotes
- ^ a b Young, "The Pig That Fell into the Privy," p. 467
- ^ "Of Meat and Myth," Lawrence W. Reed, The Freeman, November 1994
- ^ Young, "The Pig That Fell into the Privy," p. 467-480
- ^ Young, "The Pig That Fell into the Privy," p. 477
- ^ Upton Sinclair, "The Condemned-Meat Industry: A Reply to
Mr. M. Cohn Armour," "Everybody's Magazine," XIV, 1906, pp. 612-613
- ^ Sinclair, "The Jungle" ISBN 1-884365-30-2, pp i
- Young, James Harvey, "The Pig That Fell into the Privy: Upton Sinclair's The Jungle and Meat Inspection Amendments of 1906,"
Bulletin of the History of Medicine, 59, 1985, 467-80.
- Arthur, Anthony. Radical Innocent: Upton Sinclair. New York: Random House, 2006.
- In The Brass Check, Sinclair relates that the New York Herald
commissioned a follow-up story, "Packingtown a Year Later." The reporters spent two months undercover and found conditions worse
than ever; the Herald's publisher killed the story before publication.
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